My work with the land in North Carolina really opened me. So did my healing work. After vision questing, opportunities for helping the Mother were placed before me. Since I walked the land every day with my animals, I knew what flora and fauna lived there. When the town board asked for input on what to do with the shared 214 acres of property, I was able to write up a strong proposal to keep the acreage as conservation land because of the many rare and important species that made their home there. Even my dogs and cats got into the act. My dogs, Molly and Elizabeth, brought me to a tiny, bedraggled opossum, which became known as Precious. I carried her around my neck in a fleece pouch and fed her with a dropper. I eventually gave her to a possum rehabilitation specialist. She was successfully re-introduced into the wild. I've brought baby mice back from catatonic states, rescued baby birds, and journeyed for people who wanted to learn about their totem.

A is for apple. Remember learning the alphabet? We now know A is for Absolutely Awesome Apples! The apple has been around so long it could be called the first fruit. Tombs of the ancient Egyptians suggest the apple was used both as a food and a medicine. Apples are so popular now that some sources say the average consumer eats nineteen pounds of fresh apples a year. Did you know horticulturalists have catalogued about 7,500 varieties of apples around the world? Did you know most apples have five seeds? Each apple contains five seed pockets, and each pocket usually contains one seed.

Something critical is missing in our eternal quest for good health. We pride ourselves on putting so much effort into keeping fit through diet, exercise, sports, and a multitude of other activities. Yet we ignore, twenty-four hours-a-day, a fundamental cause of our aches and pains and deteriorating health—the manner in which we interfere with and abuse our bodies throughout each day—things we all exhibit from early childhood such as defective and destructive postural patterns which build up tension, stress, and poor coordination. Most of us remain unaware both of the interference with our body performance and of the damage these things cause to our health. These kinds of problems affect all of us from the very young to the old. Unfortunately most of us have grown up not knowing that there is a better health standard.

Holistic Vision Educator: A Fulfilling and Much-needed Career
Teaching How to Have Healthy Vision for a Lifetime
by Elizabeth Abraham

There are only a handful of Vision Educators in Canada, therefore the fact that people can improve their vision and learn to see more clearly is not well-known. Vision is a learned skill. As healthy babies interact with their environment, their visual skills develop naturally and effortlessly. For a growing number of people however, the ability to see clearly at all distances does not continue for a life-time. At some point—for some in childhood, for others in teenage years, in early adulthood, or in their forties and beyond—vision becomes blurry. Just as good vision developed unconsciously, poor vision habits also develop unconsciously.

The human species faces an apparent paradox. We have embraced economic growth as our primary indicator of human progress. Yet as economic output and consumption grow the number of people forced into lives of dehumanizing deprivation increases and the quality of life of all but the wealthiest among us declines. The reason is as simple as it is disturbing. Sometime toward the end of the Twentieth Century the human species passed over a critical threshold in its relationship to our home planet. Humanity's collective demand on the regenerative capacity of Earth's ecosystem grew to exceed the limit of what can be sustained. The more the economy grows the greater the demand, the more rapid the depletion of the living systems that are the source of all real wealth, and the more intense the unequal competition between rich and poor for what remains—a competition the poor invariably lose. (www.greatturning.org)

The first key to living a passion-filled and financially successful life is to guide life from the perspective of what brings the most joy. The general definition I use for life purpose is what we love to do that makes the world a better place, or somehow contributes to the lives of others. The other practical side of the equation is that life purpose, once identified, must be channelled in a way that fulfills a need. I don't go along with those who say "follow your bliss and the money will follow." If you follow your bliss, you may become blissful but not necessarily financially successful . . . unless your bliss fulfills or creates a societal need. What we are aiming at here is to take what one loves to do that makes the world a better place and position it in the marketplace in a way that it creates financial success and leads to what I like to call vocational ecstasy. There is no more rewarding experience related to life purpose than being paid extremely well to do what you love.

Another new year has arrived and with it comes the urge to make resolutions for the changes we wish for our lives. It is about new beginnings and taking time to reflect on the past year and how we might like to do some things differently. Hopefully you will be able to spend some quiet time thinking about what brings you joy and happiness and then give yourself permission to have those experiences more often in your life. We are all very busy folks these days and in order to have good health and happiness it is important to maintain a balance and to reduce stress, which compromises the immune system and makes us more susceptible to sickness. This is not new information but it is something of which we have to keep reminding ourselves, because we often get caught up in being so busy we forget to honour the body, mind, and spirit balance.

Through the Tales of Winter: Enter the Sacred Cave
Medical Hazards of the Nuclear Age
Create Beauty and Sacred Space in Your Home and Life
Listen to Your Body and Stay Healthy
Natural Reflections: Nature's Power - Our Ecosystem Has Its Own Balance
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